The Exchange Student
by live the rainbow
Summary: Dev. has wandered into one of the most guarded secrets of all times, and there is NO WAY that she's going to let HER memory get wiped. Instead she takes Dumbledore up on an offer to be a sort of
1. The beginning

It was one of the first times in my life that I was scared. I was just waiting here, waiting to see what they would do to me. I assessed the situation, and decided that it was not good at all. In short, I had stumbled upon a world that no one has ever known about at all.  
I looked up at the two men arguing in front of me, one was a very, very old man, with a long gray beard, and surprisingly young, spry blue eyes, twinkling behind moon shaped glasses, his argument seemed to be in my favor, so I labeled him the protagonist of my story, and made a note of it in my mind to learn his name, assuming that he won and I could keep my memory. On the other hand, there was a man named Fudge, the one who I had caught in the middle of a spell.  
"We cannot allow a muggle, a muggle child no less, to know that we exist." He yelled at the old man. I winced, this guy was really pissing me off.  
"But this brings up the question, is it morally correct to deprive someone of their memories of what has happened to them, when we take away a piece of their memory, we leave an unfilled void in their lives, however small." The old man looked sober, and added to his rant in a low voice, "I have never used a memory charm on muggles." Fudge blustered, and turned red in either amazement, or in anger.  
"But surely," he wheedled, it would do no harm to this girl to take a small bit of her memory-"  
"Excuse me!" I broke in, wizards or not, this was not going to pass, "this girl has a name, it's Devonny!" (actually, I preferred Dev, but I'd let that pass for now), "and there is no way that my memory is being erased, ever!" The old man smiled faintly, and Fudge looked shocked.  
"You see that Dumbledore?" Fudge yelled at the old man 'Dumbledore, I thought to myself', "she's from the states as well! We can't let this pass. He raised his stick/wand thing high in the air, and pointed it at me. Before the fat beast could say ANYTHING I grabbed it out of his hands and snapped it in half. Fudge had been angry before, but now he looked like he was going to have a coronary. I threw his broken stick thing back at him.  
"Don't EVER insult Americans in front of me, and don't mess with me man, I'm not a good enemy to have." I sat back in the chair where I had been for the last hour or so while I listened to their argument grow. Hopefully this display hadn't changed Dumbledore's mind about me.  
I was surprised to find him on the verge of laughter.  
"Was it that pathetic?" I asked as Fudge stormed out of the room in the pub, and out of what had seemed to be a solid wall an hour ago.  
"Actually, I'm quite surprised at you young lady." Dumbledore said seriously to me, his eyes still twinkling with mirth, "you see, that was about the most insulting thing that you could do to him. When wizards are exiled from the wizarding community, their wands are snapped in half. As you can guess, the fact that you, a muggle snapped his wand is almost overwhelming to him."  
"Wicked-shway" I said absently, watching as a strange looking couple walked into the bar, and took a seat at the counter.  
"What?" asked Dumbledore at my word  
"Oh!" I said, looking up at him apologetically, "it's one of the words that me and my friends in the US adopted, we've made up a new dialect for ourselves." The old dude looked a bit confused at this, so I changed the subject, maybe making up new words wasn't a wizard thing, or an English thing or something. "so, what're you gonna do with me now? I'm not going to let you erase my memory, and if you let me go, I'm not going to tell anyone about your world."  
"I have a better idea." Dumbledore told me, "The school that I… run, could use an exchange student, and a muggle from The States would do quite well." I thought about it, a school full of wizards… it sounded dangerous, and scary, and… fun!  
"YEAH!" I yelled so that the whole pub turned around to look at me. I took out my cell phone and convinced my parents that this was a great opportunity for me, although I think that they were somewhat "influenced" by Dumbledore's wand. I would be staying there for a year, which worked out well, because all my friends were going on exchanges that year, and staying home would have been lonely.  
After the arrangements for my clothes were made (England or not, I am not going to wear "slacks", jeans for me thanx), I was shown up to a room that I was going to be sharing with the girl who was going to be my "student advisor" at Hogwarts. I walked into the room after thanking Dumbledore profusely. Me and my roomy looked each other up and down. The first thing I noticed was the hair, it was well… big, but then again I told myself, you've been known to refer to your own hair as the beast. Actually, this girl looked like my kind of person, unconventional.  
"Hi!" I smiled "I'm Dev, McNally." I held out my hand, and then added, "O, and I'm American." The girl looked at me strangely, and shook my hand.  
"Hi" she said, "I'm Hermione, and I'm English." 


	2. Where it begins to get interesting

O, by the way, since I'm not JK Rolling, I don't own Harry Potter, and probably never will, well that is unless she amazingly wills Harry Potter some American that she's never met. Umm OK I'm blabbering, so here's the story. Yea, review!!!! PLEASE!!! I crave REVIEWS!  
  
Me and Hermione were sitting in the middle of the town square. It was kinda scary, I decided, but cool too, these people just walked around every day doing their routines, and not realizing what a great thing they had going for them. It would have been great to be a witch,, I sighed to myself.  
"What are you doing?" Hermione asked, and I looked up, I had probably trailed off mid-sentence to look at the family of wizards walking by.  
"Oh, I dunno," I answered tentatively, "Have you ever gone people watching?"  
"Not really." She said, and I took a deep breath winding up for my shpeal on the wonders of people watching.  
"Oh! Here they come Dev!" she told me, and I looked around, I wanted to see these guys that she had been talking about, constantly, for the whole day. Into the ice cream parlor came 2 guys me and Hermione's age. One of them was maybe 5'5" with dark hair, celery green eyes, and a scar on his forehead. Despite the scar, he (who I assumed to be Harry) was kinda cute, in a messy kind of way. The other one, who must have been Ron was the opposite, he was taller than Harry by 3" or so, and had flaming red hair, and had the looks of a track runner (thin, but not skinny).  
"Hey!" I yelled out to them, and they walked over, surprised because they obviously had no clue who I was.  
"Who the heck are you?" Ron asked me, and I laughed, it's great when people just bluntly ask you things like that.  
"My name's Dev… the loon" I held out my hand, and shook both of theirs. They looked to Hermione for an explanation of why some freak such as myself had joined their happy little posse.  
"Umm, this is Dev." Hermione explained,  
"We know THAT Hermione!" Ron cut in, "but what is she doing here?"  
"No offense or anything," Harry spoke, trying to smooth over the insult  
"'s OK," I said, "I'm from the Connecticut, in the United States, well, you can probably tell that from my accent, but anyway, I'm also a muggle, or whatever." I enjoyed the reaction to this, Harry pulled back from the table in surprise, and Ron leaned in closer.  
"Really?" he asked, "What are you doing here."  
"Oh, she's here as a sort of exchange student." Hermione broke in, and I sighed as the attention shifted back to her. "She saw Fudge do some magic, and well, she ended up here."  
"But wouldn't you have just had your memory erased?" Harry asked, and my eyes narrowed  
"NO ONE, is going to erase my memory!" I said, and then grinned to myself, "and anyway, I snapped his wand in half, so it'll be a good long time till he tries to mess my mind up more than it already is!" There was a sort of uncomfortable silence, "Hey," I broke in, Umm how bout ice cream, treat of the ministry of magic's charge account!"  
"Now this girl speaks my language!" Ron smiled, and I felt a tingle run up my spine.  
*~*~*  
The train was bright red, and really pretty (if you can call a train pretty). I dragged my trunk out onto platform 9 and ¾ and drafted Harry and Ron to drag the thing onto the train.  
"Jeese!" Ron puffed as he finally put it into the luggage compartment, "why didn't you just have your dad put a spel-, oh."  
I laughed, "You forgot didn't you?" I asked, and he smiled sheepishly, at that moment, I was glad that my skin was just the right tone so that it rarely showed a blush, because I could feel my face get warm. Then he rushed out and pulled Hermione's trunk onto the train with ease. Hermione walked a bit sullenly onto the train, it was strange, but she had been acting that way ever since the ice cream parlor.  
"So, got the back to school blues?" I asked, feeling a little strange, she had refused to sit with Harry and Ron on the train, so we were all alone.  
"Oh, not really," she answered, "School's so much fun! I mean, the work's not all that hard, and, it's just fun to be there!"  
"Really?" I asked, "most kids would rather go to the dentist than have to go to school.  
"Ummm," she said  
"What? You like dentists too?" I laughed  
"My parents are both dentists." She smirked, and I clapped my hand over my mouth.  
"Open mouth, insert foot!" I pronounced, "but do you mind if I took off my shoe first, it's leather, and I'm a vegetarian!" she laughed, and I was glad that she hadn't taken too much offense. I was going to be hanging out with her all year, I didn't want to make an enemy, plus, she was nice.  
The nest hour was spent detailing what I was going to tell people, from what I could tell, I wasn't allowed to even talk to this one kid, Draco.  
"Why?" I had asked, and the whole story came out, there was some type of group (sorta like the KKK) run by the fathers of a few people in the school.  
"It can't be PROOVEN of course!" Hermione said, "But there's no denying it, and any muggle's not safe." I touched my hoop earrings, and hoped that the spell that had been cast on them really would neutralize all the magic that tried to touch me.  
I walked down the isle of the train towards the lady with the food, food is good no matter where you are, however magical or strange, and I was one of the lucky few with the metabolism to match my diet. I grabbed a few more chocolate frogs, and started back to the cabin. Suddenly, I found myself pinned against the wall.  
"I've heard about you muggle!" I heard through the black fog that had clouded my vision when I hit the wall. I tried to breath in, and found that there was a hand squeezing my windpipe. I blinked, and saw the face of my attackers. One's hair was a light, light, blonde, which matched perfectly with his pure white skin. Behind him stood tow shapeless blobs, who would have been playing football at any school in America.  
\"There's no way that I'm going to let you set foot in Hogwarts!" I glared at him, but there wasn't much else I could do. A short little red headed girl began to walk down the hall way, and seeing what was happening, ran into a compartment close by. 'Good,' I though to myself, 'help's coming'. I tried to struggle out of his grip, but the guy, Draco I assumed, had me completely helpless. The edges of my vision started to move in, and I fought to stay awake, fearing what he would do to me if I were unconscious.  
I heard a door open, and the girl, dragged Harry, closely followed by Ron into the isle.  
"Draco!" Harry yelled, sounding far away. Hazily, I realized that Ron had began to run towards me, I just have to stay awake for a few more seconds I thought, but my eyelids began to close, and the world turned black. 


End file.
